well, then

I was weeding the reference section at work today and came across the book American Shelter by Lester Walker. It looked like a great book (reviewers at Amazon agree with me) and I put it aside to flip through before I reshelved it. Of course, I went straight for the Craftsman era (California, 1905), and to my surprise, found a separate section a few pages later on the Bungalow style (Countrywide, 1910). While Mr. Walker had nothing but praise to lavish on the Craftsman style home, his opinion of the Bungalow was tempered by this statement:

The Bungalow Style was so popular after 1905 that it became the first style to be built in quantity by the contractor-builder. By 1910, throughout all of California and most other parts of the country, street after street was lined with differently styled bungalows built for speculative sale. Plan books and monthly journals made it possible for any contractor or future homeowner in any part of the country to rerect a bungalow. So, despite its lofty aspirations and exotic antecedants, the Bungalow Style ended up sloppily imitated in thousands of tacky boxes. It has come to represent both the best and the worst in American architecture.

Tacky and sloppy though some of them may have been (probably ours included!), they at least seem to have held up better than some of this generation's contractor-builder homes.